It is even more pathetic that these apparatchiks think that some end is served by telegraphing their twinges of conscience to the rest of the world . . . as if that somehow makes the drone killing alright.

If they really saw that what Obama and the rest of his administration are doing is wrong -- and if they really wanted to throw a wrench in the works -- there is a clear course of action.

When I see "unnamed members of the State Department and Justice Department" -- the people who allegedly are concerned that the Obama administration is doing something wrong on drones -- use their power of exit to influence their erring masters, I'll fly to Washington to shake their hands.

Until then, it's just crocodile tears.

Related posts

More than anyone else, the beneficiaries of permawar are the politicians who thrive on the power to make and control wars.

There can be no question but that Americans and the rest of the world will
eventually wake up to the terror being inflicted in their name on
Pakistanis and others. The only question that will then remain will be
whether Obama, Panetta, and the whole drone "kill chain" will be
prosecuted as war criminals or as ordinary criminals. (And God help them
if they are condemned to the limbo of "unlawful enemy combatant" -
entitled to neither civil nor military justice.)

"In response to the consequences of war, each of us is presented with the
responsibility to say something and do something to prevent more
killing. For better or for worse, how we respond to the moral
challenges of our times defines who we are, as citizens, as parents, as
neighbors, and as members of the global community."

Saturday, November 10, 2012

On a day when we think about those who suffer so greatly from war -- veterans, as well as those who don't live to be veterans, as well as the enormous numbers of civilian victims of war -- it is easy to breathe a sigh of relief over our ability to (sometimes) end (some) wars.

But maybe we should, instead, devote ourselves to looking once again at how those wars get started.

The historian A.J.P. Taylor had a startling insight about WWI - the war whose end we commemorate tomorrow. In studying how the war came about in the first place, he realized that the countries involved programmed themselves into a corner by the way they prepared their highly-efficient and "smart" systems (transport and other -- to "respond" to a war that they hoped wouldn't come:

[A]ll of the great powers believed that if they possessed the ability to mobilise their armed forces faster than any of the others, this would serve as a sufficient deterrent to avoid war and allow them to achieve their foreign policy. Thus, the general staffs of the great powers developed elaborate timetables to mobilise faster than any of their rivals. When the crisis broke in 1914, though none of the statesmen of Europe wanted a world war, the need to mobilise faster than potential rivals created an inexorable movement towards war. Thus Taylor claimed that the leaders of 1914 became prisoners of the logic of the mobilisation timetables and the timetables that were meant to serve as deterrent to war instead relentlessly brought war. [Source: A.J.P. Taylor article on Wikipedia]

Taylor's book on the war was entitled War By Timetable.

The historian Barbara Tuchman expands on this in her brilliant, unforgettable The Guns of August. She places the mobilisation planning in the context of the larger move by all the powers involved to develop enormous staffs to plan, plan, plan for war.

There is an eerie reminder of war by railway timetable in William L. Shirer's monumental The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Shirer reminds us that the armistice of 11/11/18 was signed in a railway carriage -- and that when Hitler invaded France in WWII, he dug up the very same railway carriage, and had it transported to the very same spot, and forced the French representatives to sign the surrender terms in it.

Today, it may seem quaint to think about the role that trains played in the cataclysms of the 20th century. Could something as simple as a bunch of trains, once set in motion, possibly put people on a course they couldn't reverse?

In my opinion, the reason to focus on drones is this: when we focus on
drones, the general
public is able to "get," to an unusual extent, the degree to which
popular consent has been banished from the process of carrying out state
violence. (Sure, it was banished long ago, but the absence of a human
in the
cockpit of a drone suddenly makes a light bulb go off in people's
heads.) It takes some prodding, but people can sense that drone use
somehow crosses a line. And that opens up the discussion about how our consent has been eliminated from the vast range of US militarism.

The U.S. can get more "bang for the buck" out of each
pair of boots it puts on the ground, because -- through the magic of
robotics -- it can back up those boots with Hellfire missiles and
500-lb. bombs. For the folks back home, it helps maintain the illusion that the U.S. isn't really intervening in a way that risks escalation. For the population of the affected areas of Iraq, it helps maintain the
balance of terror -- because those armed drones are just part of a much
larger fleet of drones that is patrolling the skies over Baghdad. ("Is that drone overhead aiming . . . or just 'looking'?" From the ground, one has to assume they're all aiming . . . . )

Now comes the messy part. We need many more people to engage with with
the emotions aroused by drones. This is going to involve many different
groups of people, engaging with this topic in many different ways:
churches and faith groups . . . young people . . . . The point is: the
discourse on drones is going to get out of our hands. It isn't always
going to go the way we want. But the important thing is that many, many
people are going to be talking about it in the ways that feel
appropriate to them.

Thursday, November 8, 2012

In case you haven't read it lately, I strongly recommend giving 1984 a fresh read. My memory of it was of a book that was clever, but a bit shallow, and one that ultimately imparted a feeling of comfort because, after all, it was pointing a finger at the misdeeds of other societies. (Okay, okay, it's been a long time since I last read it . . . . )

NATO protests, Chicago, May 2012

What I'm finding instead is a book that is both packed with insight into the psychology of the public experience of repression, and startlingly prescient about the specific facts of our world today.

With respect to the latter of these, allow me to quote just three brief descriptions that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up:

In the distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a blue-bottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. (p. 2)

But it was the passage that seemed to describe drone strikes really made me stop short:

"Steamer" was a nickname which, for some reason, the proles applied to rocket bombs. . . . The bomb had demolished a group of houses two hundred meters up the street. . . . Thre was a little pile of plaster lying on the pavement ahead of him, and in the middle of it he could see a bright red streak. When he got up to it he saw it was a human hand severed at the wrist. (p. 74)

This description was quite startling to encounter, shortly after seeing the account of Pat Chaffee, recently returned from the Code Pink delegation to Pakistan to protest U.S. drone killings, entitled, "Body Pieces".

I feel quite sure that when I read this passage years ago, I thought, "Well, certainly, that will never happen . . . .

As the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights prepared to
convene a conference on surveillance on October 19, 2013, it was a shock
to find that the majority of the Illinois congressional delegation
voted AGAINST the Amash Conyers Amendment -- the measure to curtail NSA
surveillance.

"What are the unseen possibilities and risks associated with drones?" We need the insights of lots of people -- including the work of
thinkers who are no longer living -- that are good at imagining the
future and considering previously unimagined possibilities.

Monday, October 8, 2012

I was at a book event at the Chicago Public Library several weeks ago, in which Pankaj Mishra discussed his new work, From the Ruins of Empire. The book profiles thinkers in several Asian countries at the turn of the last century -- Liang Qichao in China, among others -- who turned their intellects to the problem of the West, its material superiority, and how to respond to it.

Lu Xun

The discussion of Mishra's book brought to mind my undergraduate years, focused on the study of Chinese and Japanese history, and I remembered how difficult it had been as a student to begin to even understand the challenge faced by people like Liang. It is not easy -- even with 20-20 hindsight -- to characterize the "West" as it confronted China (and other countries), and the difficulty of doing so in context is nearly inconceivable.

I was amused at the book event to see poor Pankaj field the inevitable questions from the audience: "Why did you choose certain thinkers and not others? Why Tagore and not Gandhi?" And, "Why not Mao?" And I smiled inwardly and asked, "Yes, why not Mao? Why Liang and not Mao? Or, for that matter, why Liang and not Zeng Guofan? or Kang Youwei? or Yen Fu? or Lu Xun? or Sun Yatsen?"

Yes: "Why not Lu Xun?" Most of all, I wondered, "Why not Lu Xun?"

Lu Xun was an author who is said to have defined the spirit of ferment and revolution after 1919 in China, generally referred to as the May 4th Movement. For me, Lu Xun's entire body of work can be boiled down to two elements: his epiphany about the challenge China faced, and his location of the heart of that challenge in his story, "The True Story of Ah Q."

Lu Xun's epiphany about the challenge China faced came when he was a medical student in Japan. Following the logic of several waves of thinkers before him, Lu Xun was intent on gaining expert, material, scientific knowledge in order to be of service to his country. His turning point came when he sat in an audience together with other patriotic Chinese students to view a news slide, which depicted Japanese troops beheading Chinese captives during hostilities in North China. Lu Xun came to the conclusion that China would never respond effectively to the challenges it faced until Chinese people were able to search their hearts and find the spiritual bases of their subjugation, and to overcome them. Until that happened, he concluded, scientific, material "solutions" would be moot. He abandoned his medical studies and became a writer.

Lu Xun's seminal work, "The True Story of Ah Q", is a portrait of a woebegone member of China's lumpenproletariat. Ah Q has many strikes against him. But the most important one, laid bare by Lu Xun, is a self-deceiving habit of mind, as epitomized in several fragments of internal monologue which occurs after Ah Q is beaten up:

Then only after Ah Q had, to all appearances, been defeated, had his brownish pigtail pulled and his head bumped against the wall four or five times, would the idlers walk away, satisfied at having won. Ah Q would stand there for a second, thinking to himself, "It is as if I were beaten by my son. What is the world coming to nowadays. . . ." Thereupon he too would walk away, satisfied at having won.

Whatever Ah Q thought he was sure to tell people later; thus almost all who made fun of Ah Q knew that he had this means of winning a psychological victory. So after this anyone who pulled or twisted his brown pigtail would forestall him by saying: "Ah Q, this is not a son beating his father, it is a man beating a beast. Let's hear you say it: A man bearing a beast!"

Illustration: Ah Q
Zhao Yannian (born 1924)

Then Ah Q, clutching at the root of his pigtail, his head on one side, would say: "Beating an insect—how about that? I am an insect—now will you let me go?"

But although he was an insect the idlers would not let him go until they had knocked his head five or six times against something nearby, according to their custom, after which they would walk away satisfied that they had won, confident that this time Ah Q was done for. In less than ten seconds, however, Ah Q would walk away also satisfied that he had won, thinking that he was the "foremost self-belittler," and that after subtracting "self-belittler" what remained was "foremost." Was not the highest successful candidate in the official examination also the "foremost"? "And who do you think you are anyway?"

After employing such cunning devices to get even with his enemies, Ah Q would make his way cheerfully to the wine shop to drink a few bowls of wine, joke with the others again, quarrel with them again, come off victorious again, and return cheerfully to the Tutelary God's Temple, there to fall asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow . . . . (See "The True Story of Ah-Q -- Chapter Two: A Brief Account of Ah-Q's Victories")

For me, the lesson of Lu Xun is that it is so easy to be dazzled by affairs of state and military technology, and fail to address the need for a spiritual awakening, and the adoption of new habits of mind. This, it seems to me, is the secret to China's ability to revolutionary change during the 20th century, and radically alter its place in the world -- a monumental accomplishment and one that is far from over. And it provides a valuable insight on why people in the Muslim world place such a high value on the spiritual guidance they gain from their faith, from a deep, deep submission to spiritual discipline.

I'm glad that we're starting to debate drone warfare, but I'm concerned that Americans are stuck at the surface of the problem -- the technology, the politics -- and not getting deep enough into the psychology that allows us to tolerate the injury being done to others. Are we being lured into the same old debates about command chains and throw-weights, and failing to own up to the spiritual bankruptcy that enables us to continue to operate these killing machines? Is this a question for a small number of liberal antiwar activists? Or for every member of the society that considers themselves a person of conscience and/or faith?

This need to get at the spiritual basis of our drone "addiction" is the impetus behind the Awake to Drones project.

* * * * *

Image by Alfonso Munoz, from Windows and Mirrors: Reflections on the War in Afghanistan: The aftermath of war is rarely envisioned by the powers that trigger such events. Such views are usually blinded by greed and massive egos. Those who survive will continue to live with a lifetime's worth of emotional damage beyond the healing of physical wounds. Photography has captured more images than I can mentally handle (and I am the lucky one living removed from such places). I wanted to convey the atrocities like an investigator who outlines the bodies on the scene of a crime, leaving behind a silhouette on the ground where the horrific events have taken place.

Related posts

I'm grateful to my friend, Jim Barton,
for framing the problem in a way that is adequately broad, and yet
contains a measure of hope. It's about the future, and whether we have
one -- or can construct one -- he said. Young people today are asking:
Do I have an economic future? Does the planet have a future? Will
(nuclear) war extinguish everybody's future?

I wonder if, years from now, we will be thinking back to today and
feeling surprise at how little we thought about some of the developments
in our world, and in our country, and how we talked about them even
less. Someday will I have to explain to my kids, or to my kids' kids,
why it was that "people just weren't talking about it" . . . ?

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

When we think about practices that our society surrounds with taboos -- cannibalism, incest -- we tend to assume that those practices are extreme, and difficult to engage in.

But that is the point of taboos: that is what taboos are intended to make us think.

Because the reality is that the practices that taboos protect us against are the easiest things in the world.

In a society that eats meat, there is nothing easier than grabbing the neighbor's children and cooking them. To sexually active people, the most convenient sex partners are those who live in close proximity.

We have taboos against these practices despite the fact that they
are convenient. The taboos reflect a recognition of social
disruptiveness that outweighs the benefits of some limited subset of
circumstances in which the practices happen -- and, more importantly,
even the possible desires of the most powerful people in the society.

Géricault, Raft of the Medusa (detail)

For instance, we seem to encounter cannibalism mainly in hypothetical
lifeboats where someone has already hypothetically died, and others can
hypothetically survive by sustaining themselves on the flesh of the
deceased. But the cannibalism taboo was established to prevent not this
far-fetched situation, but the kind of flesh-eating that could be
expected to take place every day without it.

Today,
drones are set loose by the United States government day after day to
kill people in country after country, and in the limited number of cases
in which justifications are even proffered, they are extremely tenuous:
"Well, we had reason to believe . . . on good authority . . . that the
victim was engaged in preparing to plot . . . or was otherwise associate
with . . . . " Drone victims in remote regions 6,000 miles away have
about as much chance of defending themselves as hypothetical lifeboat
passengers.

The problem with drones is that their
computerized, high-tech, robotic, automated killing long ago came to
outrun -- by a long shot -- any semblance of human agency in controlling
them. And it's only getting worse every hour.

Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa

"An over-life-size painting that depicts a moment from the aftermath of the
wreck of the French naval frigate Méduse, which ran aground off the coast
of today's Mauritania on July 5, 1816. At least 147 people were set adrift
on a hurriedly constructed raft; all but 15 died in the 13 days before their
rescue, and those who survived endured starvation and dehydration and
practiced cannibalism." (Source: Wikipedia)

An exaggeration? Hardly. This is exactly the kind of activity that our society governs with taboo. We are indulging a fantasy that "reasonable" use of drones can be determined by logic and policy and jurisprudence, and all the while more and more people are being killed, and the technology is reaching the point of being uncontrollable.

The day will come when we would no more elect to office a person who believes in setting robotic drones loose to kill other people than we would someone who eats the flesh of their next door neighbor or has sex with their sister. Instead, we will cast such people outside of social bounds.

Related posts

I've suggested that it's time for a serious debate on drones,
and that a good place to start is with Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of
Robotics." Here are 10 questions that come straight out of the writings
of Asimov and that can help spur the debate.

In my opinion, the reason to focus on drones is this: when we focus on
drones, the general
public is able to "get," to an unusual extent, the degree to which
popular consent has been banished from the process of carrying out state
violence. (Sure, it was banished long ago, but the absence of a human
in the
cockpit of a drone suddenly makes a light bulb go off in people's
heads.) It takes some prodding, but people can sense that drone use
somehow crosses a line. And that opens up the discussion about how our consent has been eliminated from the vast range of US militarism.

(See "Why focus on drone attacks?")Beyond recognizing the inherent contradictions of "pre-emptive
violence," we must confront an urgent problem related to technology: the
automation of "pre-emptive violence" -- e.g. via drone technology -- is
leading to a spiral (or "loop" or "recursive process") that we may not be able to get out of.

Friday, September 7, 2012

In a flurry of debates in October, the U.S. presidential candidates will talk about every topic under the sun -- both domestic and foreign -- in locations across the country -- from Denver to New York City to Boca Raton -- in formats both formal and informal -- with an assortment of moderators from all the major networks.

Saturday, October 13, also happens to come at the culmination of the "Drones Week of Action" (October 6-13): "The Drones Campaign Network in the UK is organizing a week of action to protest the growing use of armed drones from 6th – 13th October. The week coincides with the International Keep Space for Peace Week which focuses on the militarization of space."

Who should participate in such debates? And who should organize them? Well, at this point, there are local groups all over the United States -- and all over the world -- that are deeply concerned and extremely active in trying to address the drones problem. The Occupy movement has taken up the issue. Activity is picking up on college campuses. The churches are getting involved. A few brave journalists are leading the way in asking questions. There may even be one or two independent politicians who want to step up to the plate on the issue.

In school: debate drones

And, after all, do we need the permission of the Democratic or Republican party to take up an issue? For that matter, if we're talking about an issue that truly matters, do we imagine that the Democratic or Republican party would want to risk being part of the conversation?

GET INVOLVED

Do you think it's time to get the drones issue out in the open? There are groups in nearly every state involved in combating the menace of drones. Get involved with one today and help figure out how to make October 13 the day to break the silence about drones.

In my opinion, the reason to focus on drones is this: when we focus on
drones, the general
public is able to "get," to an unusual extent, the degree to which
popular consent has been banished from the process of carrying out state
violence. (Sure, it was banished long ago, but the absence of a human
in the
cockpit of a drone suddenly makes a light bulb go off in people's
heads.) It takes some prodding, but people can sense that drone use
somehow crosses a line. And that opens up the discussion about how our consent has been eliminated from the vast range of US militarism.

Now comes the messy part. We need many more people to engage with with
the emotions aroused by drones. This is going to involve many different
groups of people, engaging with this topic in many different ways:
churches and faith groups . . . young people . . . . The point is: the
discourse on drones is going to get out of our hands. It isn't always
going to go the way we want. But the important thing is that many, many
people are going to be talking about it in the ways that feel
appropriate to them.

Monday, July 30, 2012

The New York Times is trying to tell us something. "Look, I'm not your conscience," it seems to be trying to say. "I'm not responsible for getting everything ethically right: that's your job. I just lob stuff up for you to react to. Have you got a pulse? REACT!"

Let's start with the title of the article that appeared on the front page of today's Times. When a major newspaper uses the term "kill shot" in a headline without irony -- without quotation marks, as I just used -- it screams out for us to say "WAIT A MINUTE! We don't talk about killing and injury so glibly!" (See Elisabeth Bumiller, "A Day Job Waiting for a Kill Shot a World Away".)

Drone pilot console

Moving on to the first paragraph, we are reminded that the nation's newspapers long ago abandoned any pretense of judiciousness in reporting about the combatant status of the targets of the U.S. military and the C.I.A. The people in the story are "insurgents" and "militants" -- apparently because the military says so. The words "alleged" and "reported" and "suspected" are nowhere to be seen. And that's why we, the readers, need to mentally supply those words and restore some semblance of reality to the story.

The story goes on to report that drone operators might feel empathy for the people they follow with their video eyes ... but, on the other hand, they claim they don't lose any sleep over the attacks they carry out ... and yet they do know that it's more than just a video game ... at least when commanders "beat into their crews" the message that it's not just a video game.

Is that all clear?

Anyone trying to get a moral bead on the issue of drone operation could be forgiven for getting dizzy. Perhaps the most honest sentence in the whole article is this:

In his 10 years at Creech, he said without elaborating, "I've seen some pretty disturbing things."

Figure it out, reader!

The U.S. military is desperately trying to beef up the ranks of its drone pilots - to meet a "near insatiable demand for drones." There's only one way that's going to happen, and that's if we let our young people think that it's okay to sign up. The world of military service is more abstracted and foreign than ever. If ever there was a time that young people needed guidance from others about what military service might mean for them, that time is now.

The New York Times is putting us on notice -- this is where the real battleground is -- at the recruiting station. It's not the job of The New York Times -- or any other part of the media -- to pass judgement on the state of the world. Their job is just to tee up the issue. It's up to us, on the other hand, to face those issues head on, and to do something about them.

Grounded raises tough questions. I was hoping that the
play would challenge the idea that killing people with drones is good.
It's a reflection of the seriousness of this work that that is just one
of the issues it raises; others include our society's willingness to
destroy the people who we employ to "serve" ("serve our country," serve
us in general), our culture's worship of violence / use of force, and
the consequences of pervasive surveillance.

We need to do several things for our young people. First of all, we
need to show them pictures of war and explain: "This is what real chaos looks like." And then we need to ask, "Still think this sounds appealing?"

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

I arrived in Dayton, OH, at 8 a.m. after driving through the night from Chicago. In the parking lot of Fritsch's Big Boy, I met up with two friends from No Drones Wisconsin. We were there to rendezvous with Nick Mottern and George Guerci from Know Drones, who were bringing MQ-9 Reaper drone replicas for us, as well as for anti-drone activists from Indiana.

I had rented a small van to take my new 8' drone replica back to Chicago; I knew that, even when it was broken down for transport, the drone replica and the display stand would require a bit of space. I was curious to see how Nick and George were managing FOUR drone replicas! Before long, Nick and George arrived from New York, via Columbus, towing a 12-feet-long enclosed trailer.

Delivery of KnowDrones replicas of the General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper
drone to antiwar activists from Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.

My jaw dropped when they opened the trailer and I saw the four model drone fuselages resting on foam cushions, with their wings neatly strapped to the front wall of the trailer. "These are some very, very serious people," I said to myself.

The KnowDrones replicas include careful reproductions of the Hellfire
missiles and laser-guided 500-lb bombs carried by the Reaper.

And, indeed, the Know Drones Tour has taken their replicas to do anti-drones activism throughout the U.S. Northeast: in Brooklyn, NY, southern New Jersey, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and northern Maryland. A tour of Ohio is planned for September.

Perhaps more importantly, they have assisted the Upstate NY Coalition to Ground the Drones (in New York) in building Reaper replicas and provided replicas to the NH Peace Action (in New Hampshire), Code Pink (in Washington, DC), World Can't Wait (New York City) and to Larry Carter Center, a peace activist in Charleston, South Carolina, in order to boost the drone opposition movement that is becoming a nationwide phenomenon.

To get an idea of how activists are taking the "No Drones!" message to the general public and incorporating the drones replicas made by Know Drones, consider the case of Robert Rast ....

KnowDrones replica displayed by Robert Rast, whose son was killed by
"friendly fire" from a U.S. drone while serving in the U.S. Navy.

Mr. Rast's son, Navy corpsman Benjamin Rast, was killed accidentally in a Reaper drone strike in Afghanistan in April 2011; that strike also killed Marine Staff Sergeant Jeremy Smith. Robert Rast has set the replica up in his front yard and sits with it, telling those who stop what happened to his son.

KnowDrones replica on display in Madison, WI.

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, the very active progressive community in Madison has had the chance to encounter drones model brought out by No Drones Wisconsin.

As Nick Mottern has said, the proliferation of drones and the daily increasing reliance on drone warfare is carefully calculated by our government to discourage us from criticizing U.S. war-making and killing, or even thinking about it. In effect, the nameless, faceless drones are part of an effort to "systematically deprive people of empathy" for others. (This absence of empathy is a phenomenon I wrote about in a blog post entitled "Drone Victims: Just Dots? Just Dirt?") The Know Drones models are part of an urgent effort to reverse that trend. People begin to think about the significance of drones when they feel the model hovering over them. They can begin to get a sense of the size of the drones. They start to ponder the facelessness of the drone when they are looking at it and realize that there are no windows, that there is no on-board pilot. Most important, they get it into their heads that this problem is REAL, and they become unable to shake that thought.

So: New York, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, DC, Maryland, South Carolina ... Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio ... Oregon ... Hawaii ... and discussions are now underway with activists in Michigan, North Carolina, and Colorado, and others, on using replicas of the Reaper, which has become the primary work horse of drone killing, and which will be produced in larger and larger numbers in the coming years by its manufacturer.

Coming
off our experience this past weekend once again protesting against
drone killing, drone surveillance, and related acts of militarism at the
Chicago Air and Water Show, I am more confirmed than ever in my view
that air shows are a very effective place to get our message out to the
public.

In my opinion, the reason to focus on drones is this: when we focus on
drones, the general
public is able to "get," to an unusual extent, the degree to which
popular consent has been banished from the process of carrying out state
violence. (Sure, it was banished long ago, but the absence of a human
in the
cockpit of a drone suddenly makes a light bulb go off in people's
heads.) It takes some prodding, but people can sense that drone use
somehow crosses a line. And that opens up the discussion about how our consent has been eliminated from the vast range of US militarism.

The April Days of Action Against Drones 2013 have been imaginative, colorful, powerful, and inspiring! Look at the images on this page and click
through to learn more about the ones that you want to know more about.

Sunday, July 22, 2012

People all over the country and all over the world are waking up to the drone menace. There is something about this weapon and the way it is used that is wrong - you can feel it in your gut.

I've been talking with people in the faith community in Chicago, trying to put into words just what is so wrong with drones. What is it about drones killing and drones surveillance that is qualitatively different? What makes it even worse than all the violence and war that we've seen carried out in our name to date?

SIGNATURE STRIKES

For me, it started to become clear when I learned about signature strikes. Up until then, I had been hearing a lot about how drones could "see" people, and how what they "saw" was evaluated in some way, and some part of me had accepted the idea that there was something similar in the way a drone "sees" people and the way a person "sees" another person.

But signature strikes -- in which a drone detects some kind of human activity, and on the strength of a vague characterization of that activity unleashes a Hellfire missile -- make it clear just how people are "seen" when drones are being used.

There is a famous scene in the movie, "The Third Man," which characterizes this problem perfectly. In the film, the villain's childhood friend, Holly Martins (played by Joseph Cotton), meets the villain, Harry Lime (played by Orson Welles). They climb aboard a Ferris wheel that carries them high above Vienna. In response to the demand, "Have you ever seen one of your victims?" the villain yanks open the door of the Ferris wheel cabin menacingly and says:

"Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped moving, would you really -- old man? -- tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?"

With drones, people have become just that: dots. Bugs. In fact, the military uses the term "bug splat" for what's left after a drone strike. Of course, there are real people involved in operating drones -- "in the loop" is the Computer Science term for that "involvement" -- but we should be very, very clear that the role those people play is nothing like the role they play in any other kind of human interaction -- including other warfare and violence.

PEOPLE WHO DON'T COUNT AS PEOPLE

In a sermon about a year ago at the church I attend in Chicago -- St. Luke's Logan Square -- the Rev. Pieter Oberholzer of Inclusive and Affirming Ministries in South Africa spoke of the human impulse to dismiss other human beings as bugs and worse. He spoke of the Aramaic term raca -- literally, "spit"; essentially "trash" or "dirt". The "raca spirit," he said, is a worldview that allows us to pigeonhole some people as "dirt." And then he told us that the Good News of the New Testament can effectively be summed up as: we used to live in a worldview that allowed some people to be relegated to "dirt" -- unworthy of consideration -- but we now know that God values us all as people, and wants us to value all other people as people. Pastor Oberholzer commended to us the words of Desmond Tutu: "We are of ultimate worth" in the eyes of God. This translates, he told us, in African society, into the concept of ubuntu -- which he translated as, "I live because you live; you live because I live."

When I was a child, there was a public service announcement (perhaps for the National Council of Churches?) that ran on television. It was a parable of a rancher in the Old West, who was a pillar of his community and a stalwart of his church. This rancher had a very Old Testament view of the world, and when someone was caught stealing one of his cattle, he considered the person beneath consideration as a person. Here's a summary I found of that old PSA:

Once upon a time there was a wealthy rancher who had hundreds of cattle, and next door to his ranch was a poor farmer who could barely feed his family. One day the farmer decided he'd help himself to one of the rancher's cows, but (sounds of guns being cocked and the image of shotguns pointing at the farmer) he didn't get very far.
At the trial, the rancher told the judge, "String him up, it will teach him a lesson."
That night as the rancher slept he dreamed that he died, and was standing before God awaiting judgement.
And the Lord said, "Forgive him, it will teach him a lesson."

Those are words that I have never forgotten.

ARE WE AT A TURNING POINT? WHAT IS THIS AGE IN WHICH WE LIVE?

Graham Greene, who wrote "The Third Man" and set it in the ruins of war-ravaged Vienna, saw exactly where modern war was taking us. When we finally get around to understanding just how wrong drones are, that understanding is likely to crack wide open a recognition of the inhumanity of all the modern warfare we've been dragged into in the modern era. Like a frog that is in a pot of water whose temperature is gradually increasing until he is boiled alive, our society has stood still for advances in weaponry that allow victims to be dehumanized further and further and further. It's time to put a stop to it, and turn back the clock.

Palestine 30 CE - were Jews a "community of color?" And what was Empire
doing to keep the community within "normal" or "right" or "acceptable"
bounds? And what happened to people who looked like the "wrong" type?

If the American public knew the nature of the crimes that its government was committing in Afghanistan, could it possibly sit still and not force an end to the war, and the removal of U.S. military, intelligence, and contractors from Afghanistan?